Here is the second Child’s Play Strip! We decided to go diegetic wit it.
Algorithmic training and the attendant dopamine rewards has really turned us into fucking dolts. Engaged in constant, whirling performances like horny tropical birds, we are happy to be paid in exposure.
Because I have been around this shit as long as there was a shit to be around, it is sometimes the case that I have some level of personal involvement with some percentage of the industry’s output. In the case of Bungie, there are people who used to work there that I would fistfight the second I saw them. I would lose, obviously. I’m not trying to demonstrate some aspirational fact about myself or indicate that I’m secretly some kind of martial paragon. But I’d fight him in real fucking life. There are people who might want to fight them for other reasons, like what they’ve allowed Destiny to become. Their reasons are not as good as mine.
This is all to say that I am not encumbered by any enduring affection for Bungie, quite to the contrary, other than what is known for certain: their weird genius with shooters is what they know how to do. Everything else they apparently have to figure out after they’ve sold you the game. Which they also have a proven capacity to do. Until they forget. Bungie is Sine Wave: The Fucking Company.
But I must co-sign teens when they suggest that the Marathon hate is forced. I keep hearing about how movement is bad or stamina (they have a fancypants word for it) is low, when improving these things is a core part of the game, and different shells move in fundamentally different ways. I heard that bots are too strong, except I just heard that about ARC Raiders. I’ve heard that time to kill is too fast, from those who were killed quickly. I’ve heard there is too much text, from the illiterate. That it looks like Roblox, from those who are children mentally.
I don’t hear anything about Factional Progression, the mechanical sophistication around mods and cores, seasonal content with new shells and raid potential, things that might indicate it’s been looked at as itself in any way, shape, or form. I’m not even saying it’s good! I’m saying the discourse has neglected to describe reality.
This is what it looks like when your industry is Streamer-Pilled. If your game can’t be instantly digested by croaking, low IQ mutant swamp frogs on either side of the camera – if it isn’t some naked reconfiguration of the known – it’s dogshit, or grist for some kind of culture war, which may be the least interesting of the wars we are currently in.
(CW)TB out.